Lomography Unveils 35mm, Lo-Fi Film Motion Camera, LomoKino – Just in the Nick of Time

Make all the hipster jokes you like. Fashionable film photography could be all that lies between us and the demise of film. With camera manufacturing and film stock going out of production, enthusiasts – both the inventors/merchandisers and users – are having to rebuild the film revolution from scratch. And while this site’s name has “digital” in the title, make no mistake: creative work with light and motion is dependent on maintaining traditional techniques for the full spectrum of choice.

That’s why it’s good news that today, Lomography has a motion camera. True to Lomo’s experimental roots in art student visual play, it’s not really a movie camera in the traditional sense. It’s a throwback to the beginnings of motion film, in many ways, down to the hand crank and jerky, slow-framerate capture. You could use it to do individual frames, timelapse style, or crank up to about 3-5 frames per second.

For visualists, it looks like brilliant, experimental fun, and I’m already thinking of ways to combine this “analog” workflow with digital tools that embody the same spirit. And Lomo seems to be going to digital hybrids, too, encouraging uploads to Vimeo. That’s good news – I can’t say I’ve absolutely loved Lomography’s own web photo sharing site, which can be clunky; seeing them embrace Vimeo seems very good, indeed. The design, which I hope to check out later today if I can grab one in Berlin, has some interesting features:

Fixed focus 1m+; 0.6-1m macro mode

Continuous aperture – a departure for the “sunny / cloudy” mode on Lomos. f/5.6 – f/11. (Amusingly, they still recommend switching between the extreme settings based on whether it’s sunny or cloudy.)

A roughly 1/100 shutter, for cranking up to 3-5 fps. (This is where digital gets interesting to me – think about processing between frames.)

Hot shoe and flash. Obviously, you want a flash that recharges quickly, but the flash could be the coolest feature here.

Easy 35mm processing. Lomo suggests scanning with a flatbed. Time to hit eBay for a flatbed. Here, too, I could see some interesting DIY solutions and hacks.

Best of all, while I anticipated some wildly-expensive product here, the LomoKino is EUR 65,00. And before you complain about that, come on – how much did you spend on your last lens? And your last Adobe CS upgrade? It comes with a book, too.

But why is this important in the bigger scheme? Even as film assortments and stocks dwindle, Lomography is getting into making their own film. And that expanding retail operation, that includes cameras in places like Urban Outfitters? It may make “serious” photographers cringe, but it could be the market that sustains any kind of usable scale in film manufacturing. (Remember how pricey it was to buy The Impossible Project’s clone of Polaroid film, and how inconsistent the results were initially, and how scarce it was? Plan for more of this – and, conversely, more successes when production ramps up.)

And let’s consider just how desperate the situation is becoming. The LomoKino is hardly a replacement, but the motion movie camera is meeting its untimely end.

Matt Zoller Seitz wrote a terrific, if terrifically depressing, story for Salon.com last month:R.I.P., the movie camera: 1888-2011: Major manufacturers have ceased production of new motion picture film cameras; cinema as we once knew it is dead

The impetus for that story, in turn, was this sobering news, noted by Debra Kaufman at Creative Cow:

ARRI, Panavision and Aaton have all quietly ceased production of their film cameras to focus exclusively on the design and manufacture of digital cameras.

Now, that may make the news of a 3-ish frame-per-second 35mm film camera from Lomo seem almost more depressing to some, but I think that misses the big picture. First, reacquainting yourself with low-fidelity makes you appreciate high-fidelity in new ways – and the vast spectrum of possibility that film offers. (And, in turn, that can lead to a new understanding of digital as a medium with personality of its own – not only as a blank canvas that you use to, cough, Hipstamatic, pretend the digital camera is something it’s not. I believe that kind of appreciation is essential to visualists.)

Second, if you drive demand for film, you continue the possibility for future film cameras. That could include ongoing life for the maintenance and restoration of these cameras that are discontinued, and even new cameras yet to be designed that are at the higher-end. But film to the film camera is water: without it, everything else is moot. And it’s the scale of the film itself that is in most urgent need of protection.

In other words, sign me up for the Lomo revolution, and while digital is trying to kill film in the marketplace, digital for artists can help give film new life.

I’ll see you at the LomoKino launch party, and I’ll bring extra room in my bag.

By the way, Lomo friends: we’ve got createanalogmotion.com. So, I guess I’ll give up my usual rant about how film photography isn’t really “analog” in that it’s a chemical process th… oh, fine. You totally win.

Two huge "glitches" I see in your article. Obviously you're a digital guy, so it's understandable that you wouldn't know about labwork and film scanning: I would NEVER recommend a flatbed for scanning 35mm film. For regular stills, at 8-perf. most of them are abyssmal, for 2-perf. frames, they'd probably be borderline unusable, especially when you're spending money for a roll and processing.

Second: Movie cameras are not sold for each production, they're rented. There are some cameras at Panavision New York that are more than 60 years old that you could still get them to rent out to you. Originally the Panavision was just a blimped Mitchell.

Plenty of Aaton's and Arris on the side of every NFL football game. The "no film cameras are made anymore" statement is incredibly misleading. Panavision has NEVER sold a film camera to anyone. They're very available for rent every day, to the likes of MTV (they shoot commercials on 35mm), Geico, Chrysler "Imported from Detroit" and many many others. "Mad Men," "2 1/2 Men" and dozens of others rent Panavision products.

Arri CSC, Abel Cinetec, Otto Nemenz Cameras, Panavision on the West Coast, and many other rental houses in Chicago, Miami, Toronto, busily rent out cameras every day. You wouldn't know that from the article now, would you?

peterkirn

I wasn't saying I necessarily agreed with the conclusions of the Salon article. The one impetus for that story, though, is inescapable – ARRI, Panavision and Aaton aren't *manufacturing* the cameras any more. That, in the long run, is a pretty big deal, and I don't see the issue of whether the cameras are rented or sold really matters if the cameras themselves aren't being made.

What would matter in that event is the extent to which the existing stock of cameras can be repaired and maintained, and spare parts availability for them, and *that* — I'll agree — you wouldn't know from the Salon article.

As for flatbed scanning, Lomo went ahead and offered their own scanning service for this product, which seems to be the way their customers are going.

Now, I recognize my connections here were tenuous, especially looking back on this story, but I'd been looking for a context to bring in the larger trend with film manufacturing and what's happening with these things that are admittedly niche oddities.

To me, the fundamental issue remains whether there's sufficient demand as input in the ecosystem for things like film stock. A LomoKino and a Panavision are comparable in the way that a bicycle and a 747 are… but in this case, I do see some indications that these things that are basically novelties can help maintain interest in the larger medium and drive production of the raw materials (film) that would otherwise go away, especially if you consider them as a cultural, and not just a technological, driver.

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